My Simple Case for My Trans Life

I put this thought out there to consider — not as a truth, but as an open thought that began stirring in me 50 years ago during a conversation with my great-grandmother, Nora. It was the mid-1960s and we were in a VW bus going down the highway, talking about her trek some 70 or 80 years earlier in the late 1800’s across the great plains in a covered wagon.

“Nothing lasts forever,” my great-grandmother said. “Thank God!”

My thought is this: When those of us in the Transgender Movement, Transgender people and our allies, seek to transform archaic laws based on cruel traditions, we don’t risk losing our identity. That has never been the case.

What is the case, and has always been the case, is that we are saving lives, including our own, that would be harmed and even lost so those traditions can be preserved.

If anything, our identity, individually and as a society, is strengthened when we demonstrate that a culture and its people cannot be measured by faithful repetition of practices that demonstrate an adherence to the values of its past.

What I am trying to say, the case that I am trying to make, is that I am not trying to save my identity. I know who I am. I always did and I always will.